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It was in early summer 2005 that one of our local news papers, the Shropshire Star, printed an article about an English pilot, who recalled an air raid he had made on Stettin, East Germany, in 1943.
The article stirred up and rekindled many memories for me. I wondered if it was possible that this pilot was the same one who had bombed my house?
Stettin had been my home town since I was a young girl. My house had been bombed and flattened by a British plane and we had had comparatively few British raids.
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I was born on the 8th December, 1928, in Gristow, (Cammin County), East Germany, which is now Poland, where my grandparents lived.
I was nearly 11 when the war started. We were one of the few familys who had a radio and I remember hearing Hitler’s first radio broadcast, the day he declared war, which still sticks vividly in my mind.

I was about 12 or 13 when we moved to a village near Stettin and later we moved actually into the harbour town that borders the Baltic Sea.
Father was head gardener for a big estate and I remember going there and standing on a hill, seeing the sky bright red with the Synagogues and Jewish properties burning.

I had two friends called Ruth, and we were known as the ‘3 Ruths’. One of them, Ruth Matthias, my best friend, was a Jew. She just disappeared from school one day. Her family had a clothing shop which was burnt out and none of the family was ever heard of again.

When I left school in 1943, I was coming up to 15 years old. I had a year as a land girl, which was compulsory either when you left school or at 18 and so I decided to do it when I left school. I worked at a large nursery/small holding living on a farm and still have photos from that time.
I was then asked to go and work and train as an assistant in a laboratory but this only lasted a short time as all teenagers, both male and female, were forced to go to the front line. We were trench digging, as the Russians were already marching on Stettin. We were shot at all the time and it was extremely hard and dangerous. There was a lot of rape, pillage and gun fire, but the Cossacks were worse than the Russians, they were really wild people.

It was whilst I was digging trenches that word got to me that my home had been bombed. I managed to get back to Stettin to see what had happened to my mother and my sisters. For a while it was thought they had all been killed but they were luckily found alive and well, having been rescued by neighbours, who found them buried in the cellar of the house foundations. Our house had been raised to the ground. We knew it was by a British plane, rather than a Russian, just by the sound of the engine.

It was after this that my family and I had to evacuate from Stettin. We left with the use of hand carts and caught the last train out of the main station to a refugee camp and for what seemed an age went from one camp to another.

My father was away fighting in Russia and was taken Prisoner of War in Siberia. We had no news of him for 11 years but we finally managed to trace him with the help of the Red Cross and discovered, in August 1949, he was then in a convalescent hospital near Hamburg.

I was engaged to be married and not 21years of age, legally required written parental consent. As, at this time, we still had no news of my father, my mother had given hers in his absence, but now we had found my father again this meant that I needed his. He was in very poor health. Although I managed, with difficulty, to visit him I didn’t have the courage to tell him face to face that I was getting married and wished to marry an Englishman! It was only two weeks before the wedding that I finally telephoned the hospital to tell my father, and ask his permission, which he gave us with his blessing and he sent the written consent.

I was married in September 1949 and we came to England after my husband, Eric Cecil Clarke, had been demobbed. My husband had been my boss when I was working as a clerk for CCG (Control Commission for Germany). He was a Chief Clerk at the Headquarters of CCG and was responsible for Health or Education for the Schleswick-Holstein Area, the Northern part of Germany
Before the war Eric had had a job with a pharmaceutical company, Aspro, as a Rep. and he had a position with the same company on his return to England. I had nothing to bring with me and knew very little English and knew no one. Eric had foster parents who were wonderful to me. We initially lived in Slough, Buckinghamshire, Aspro’s H.Q., where my eldest son was born and we moved to Shrewsbury in 1951, and I had a second child, my daughter, and have lived here ever since. My husband died in 2000 having worked for the same company for over 40 years and had ‘long service’ recognition.

My mother finally was given an apartment on the outskirts of Hamburg, but life was very tough for her, not only loosing her home and all her possessions, but being a refugee from the East, was very unpopular. Two of my sisters also remained in the Hamburg area, one died in my arms in 2003 when I was visiting, the youngest sister is still alive and one sister is living in Shrewsbury.
With the years of separation my parent’s marriage was annulled, under German law this was possible after ten years, my father was eventually able to resume light work, and both my father and mother, in time, remarried.

So many memories have been awakened by one article in a newspaper, but having recalled these events I now realise that our house had been bombed more towards the end of the war.

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